Counting Crows - Rain King

Anywhere But In Between

1. Once upon a time, dear reader, we had guitar-pop bands roaming the music landscape who could jingle jangle their way through beautifully hummable melodies and sing-a-long choruses that slapped smiles on faces from Liverpool to L.A. The golden and foundational era for these delightful six-string serenades was the 1960s, and I think that’s beyond contestation thanks to the likes of those ubiquitous Liverpudlian beat merchants, Southern Californian melody-making brothers the Beach Boys, the Byrds, Zombies, Turtles, Animals, Hollies, and a host of Hall of Famers long since canonized, deserving or otherwise. So it goes. The ‘90s however, can make a potent claim to the title. This is all exercise, of course. The algorithms haven’t allowed a guitar-pop band a breakthrough in quite some time. We are left with the remnants of reconstituted bands who’ve survived deaths, retirements, and resignations to the club and casino circuit. In the broader tapestry of rock music, Counting Crows emerged as part of a vibrant tradition of guitar-pop bands, a tradition that celebrated both the joy of melody and the depth of lyricism. These bands, with their jangling guitars and heartfelt lyrics, provided a soundtrack for the first generation of adolescents to navigate the waters of self-discovery while straddling the Internet’s invention. The Crows’ sound was authentic, a realness of human emotion, the ability to transform personal angst into communal anthems, to turn individual pain into collective catharsis.

2. At the record store today, with a copy of Counting Crows’ remastered debut, August and Everything After under my arm, the clerk and I had an impromptu heart-to-heart chat.

   “When I first heard that I thought, ‘yeah, okay, another record college chicks freak out about, but now I’m just hit in the chest by it,” he said. And there it is.

   “Dude! I hear Round Here and it’s like I’ve been punched in the liver,” I responded. As far as three song runs go, Round Here, Omaha, and Mr. Jones are as formidable as it comes, and to people of my generation that run is unimpeachable. Each one, each and every one, feels different in middle age because at this juncture, I’ve lived inside these songs. These are not merely verses and refrains, but mantras of survival and assertion, of lived-in circles. They are each a declaration from the heart of the human experience, where the repetition of trials is both a burden and a crucible

   Step out the front door like a ghost into the fog
   Where no one notices the contrast of white on white
   And in between the moon and you
   The angels get a better view
   Of the crumbling difference between wrong and right

   August and Everything After begins at the center of Dylan/Cohen/Waits Venn Diagram of influences.

   Omaha, somewhere in middle America
   Get right to the heart of matters
   It's the heart that matters more

   That’s ore extracted from The Band’s or Neil Young’s goldmine. Before I get to Rain King, I want to share a piece of magic from one of the greatest living American writers we’ve got.

   The price of self-destiny is never cheap, and in certain situations it is unthinkable. But to achieve the marvelous, it is precisely the unthinkable that must be thought.

   -Tom Robbins, Jitterbug Perfume

   And that is what sits in the heart of Rain King.

3. The songs speaks to the inevitability of encountering the same obstacles, the same heartaches, and the same disillusionments. This cyclical nature of existence, however, is not merely a resignation to fate but a challenge to transcend it. It is the price of self-destiny.

   Don't try to feed me
   'Cause I've been here before
   And I deserve a little more

   That is a hard-earned lyric that doesn’t come easy. It comes from years of struggle while trying to learn and earn one’s sense of self-worth. It’s a potent stand to take. It's the recognition that one's path is not just stumbled upon but carved out with intention and perseverance. Duritz’ voice carries the weight of this realization while his exceptional guitar-pop band jingle jangles away as if to say “This is the communal anthem we need for ourselves. We’re gonna turn his realizations into collective catharsis and then share it with all of you.” And it works. The decline of guitar-pop bands signifies a loss of that joyous, organic connection between artist and audience, a connection that was as much about the shared experience of the music as it was about the music itself. The joy of guitar-pop bands was in their ability to make you feel understood, to make you believe that your struggles were shared and that, in the end, you too deserved a little more. As much I would like to believe Tom Robbins directly inspired Durtiz, it was Saul Bellow’s work that impacted Rain King the most. Bellow said that of all his characters, Eugene Henderson, of Henderson the Rain King, was the one most like himself.

   Henderson is waiting for the sun
   Oh, it seems night endlessly begins and ends
   After all the dreaming, I come home again

   The book became a totem for how I felt about creativity and writing: it was this thing where you took everything you felt inside you and just sprayed it all over everything. It’s a song about everything the goes into writing, all the feelings, everything that makes you want to write and pick up a guitar and express yourself. It’s full of all the doubts and the fears about how I felt about my life at the time.

   -Adam Duritz, VH1 Storytellers

   Rain King is is a clarion call to all who would seek to rise above the mundane. It is a reminder that the path to self-destiny is fraught with peril and cost, but it is precisely through embracing these challenges, through daring to think and act beyond the conceivable, that we touch the marvelous. The price is steep, often seeming unthinkable, but it is in paying this price that we claim our most profound victories.